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Inside the ARTiGO A2000
December 14, 2008

We've had a chance to poke around inside an ARTiGO A2000, courtesy of the mini-itx store. Our ISO standard size reference cylinder is in the foreground of the first picture.

The inside is surprisingly sparse. The 1.5GHz N701 motherboard inhabits the rear of the case, only slightly larger than the standard 80mm fan. The only other circuit boards in the case distribute power and data to the SATA drives and connect the front panel to the Nano-ITX motherboard, which accepts 12V directly from the DC socket on the back.

Everything comes cabled up, ready to go. Slide in a hard drive or two and perhaps a compact flash card with your NAS OS of choice and you have your own custom NAS in 5 minutes.

ARTiGO A2000 at the Mini-ITX Store

Permalink | mini-link

VIA launch ARTiGO A2000 Barebones Storage Server
December 08, 2008

VIA have entered the DIY NAS market with the ARTiGO A2000 Barebones Storage Server - a fully featured 1.5GHz low power consumption PC motherboard inside a dual 3.5in SATA drive bay chassis.

The A2000 is powered by a custom Nano-ITX board with 1.5GHz C7-D Processor and VX800 Chipset supporting up to 2GB of DDR2 SODIMM memory. Two 3.5in SATA drive bays support 3TB of storage with 1.5TB drives installed. A bootable type 1 Compact Flash adapter is located underneath the board, perfect for locating a NAS OS. The whole unit measures just 135 x 120 x 260 mm (5.3 x 4.7 x 10.2in) and is supplied with an external AC power adapter.

The front of the A2000 sports Power, LAN activity, LAN speed, WLAN and HDD activity LEDs as well as Power and Reset switches and a single USB 2.0 port.

The rear of the A2000 includes a Gigabit Ethernet port, support for a wireless 802.11 b/g module, two USB 2.0 ports, 3.5mm Mic and Line In and a VGA monitor output. System cooling is provided by a low-noise 8cm ball-bearing fan keeping noise levels at 26.8 dB.

The VIA ARTiGO A2000 supports Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Ubuntu 8.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (Service Pack 2) and FreeBSD (so FreeNAS should work - update 11 Dec: it does). We'll be cracking one open in the next day or so and will see how well it performs with Openfiler...

If you're a fan of lounge music, VIA's unboxing video is here

VIA's ARTiGO A2000 information page

Buy an ARTiGO 2000 at the Mini-ITX Store

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